Just wondering out here, cause Im really torn between these two. With Spotify family and Apple One I use both alternately and in both Im missing some parts that the other one have.
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for Apple Music I mostly lack good new songs suggestion algorithm, because it very often just plays me a song that I would never ever listen to - and that’s based on “continue playing” from current playlist.
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for Spotify I lack Losseless and Spatialise.
in terms of UI, both are somewhat not great
- Apple Music is cumbersome and hard to navigate to song that is currently playing.
- Spotify is just too much noise on the screen for me
What are your thoughts?
Spotify:
- not linked to Apple ecosystem (which I don’t use at all). not part of any of the other big corps (Google, Amazon) trying get full control of our digital life.
- properly multi-platform. has a Linux client
- cheap enough, no ads. advertise
- great family plan, the best of all subscription services I have seen. Single payment, but each family member has their own separate account with their own password, not just a profile like on Netflix
- most of the music I care about is available there
- great remote control between different Spotify apps and devices. When I start Spotify on my Linux box I can control it with my Android phone, just like that
pretty much all of this. i bought into a family plan of spotify premium back in maybe 2016 and haven’t looked back.
audio quality is fantastic. arguably only tidal has a higher bitrate for their premium plans, but it’s so negligible unless you’re really deep into audiophile territory. discover weekly is actually really good if you carefully curate your playlists and has led me to many new artists. while i don’t have personal experience with other platforms underground music, spotify has a shockingly large number of small time artists that i absolutely love.
The Discover Weekly playlist is far from perfect – it would often give me the same songs again and again or multiple covers of single song. But still, good enough for everyday use. And I like for alternative/indie/niche music too, so Spotify Discover Weekly is much better than most audio stations or existing playlists.
Yeah, it’s definitely not perfect, but years of crafting my existing playlists has led to a pretty solid foundation for discovery to work with. I’ll get something I’ve heard before maybe once a month these days, but this is after basically 7 years of listening almost weekly.
YouTube Music. Apple Music and Spotify are both technically better products, but YouTube Music is free with YouTube Premium and so I can save on a music subscription.
Before I made that call I had picked Spotify as it gave me access to a web player, and just worked better on my Google Home speakers.
I went between Spotify and Apple Music a few times, both are better than YouTube Music. Though once YouTube premium became available in my country it was a no-brainer to switch. I was always going to get YT Premium and especially get a free music streaming service on the side.
Kind of in the same boat right now. I’m using Apple Music right now for the following:
- Lossless should be the base level at this point, not a premium.
- The library management in Apple Music is way superior to Spotify, especially for uploading local files. Going to upload some Bandcamp stuff to my Apple Music library in the future.
- I have an issue on Spotify for Android where my 10k+ liked songs list slows to a crawl. This doesn’t happen to Apple Music. Yeah, it’s choppy when scrolling but I’d rather that than Spotify taking seconds to load the list.
Though it’s not perfect…
- there’s no Linux client at all, and though Cider is a great effort there’s some things that I miss using it (gapless playback is one, it’s essential for album listeners like myself) so I’m having to install a Windows VM to run Apple Music.
- There’s some weird gaps in some artists’ libraries. I listen to quite a bit of Kaskade, and I find it weird that some of his music isn’t on Apple Music in the UK even though it is on Spotify.
- Scrobbling is an issue. I actually coded a manual scrobbler plugin for MusicBrainz Picard to deal with this.
Tidal. Better audio quality and revenue share than Spotify, plus no Joe Rogan.
Apple Music. The initial reason was that my own music was uploaded to be part of it. Along the way I’ve been using Spotify and many others. Today, I refuse to use Spotify. Why?
- They pay musicians an even more ridiculously low amount per stream than most other services.
- They have attempted to leech off the open podcast ecosystem to lure people into theirs and lock them there.
- They actively pay and host Joe Rogan’s lies and bullshit
